In today society, a company may depend upon its network to be fully functionally in order to conduct business. Thus, a company may monitor its network in order to ensure reliable performance, enable fault detection, and detect unauthorized activities. Monitoring may be performed by connecting network taps to the network to gather information about the data traffic in order to share the information with monitoring tools.
To facilitate discussion, FIG. 1 shows a simple diagram of a network environment with a network tap. Consider the situation wherein, for example, a network environment 100 has two network devices (a router 102 and a switch 104). Data traffic may be flowing through the two network devices. To monitor the health of the network environment, a network tap 106 may be positioned between the two network devices in order to gather information about the data flowing between the two network devices. In an example, a data packet is received by router 102. Before the data packet is forwarded to switch 104, network tap 106 may make a copy of the data packet and forward the copied data packet to a monitoring device, such as an analyzer 108.
Since most network taps are configured as a bypass device, network tap 106 does not have storage capability. In other words, original data packets flow from router 102 to switch 104 via network tap 106. Further, data packets copied by network tap 106 are forwarded to one or more monitored devices. In both situations, a copy of the data packets being handled is not stored by network tap 106. Thus, if a problem arises in regard to the origin of a ‘bad’ data packet, network tap 106 is usually unable to provide useful information in resolving the problem.
Accordingly, an improved intelligent network tap for managing and/or storing the data packets flowing through the network environment is desirable.